4 comments:

As a nomenclateuse (hapax!), what can you tell us about middle names? I see that Miss Forward was in fact Fanny A. Forward, born about 1782. Wasn't that early for a middle name? I haven't generally come across then in small-town New England until the early 1800s.

Yes, indeed, middle names were somewhat unusual in 18th-c. New England, though they were gaining popularity by the end of the century.

Until the Revolution, middle names were generally surnames — either the mother's maiden name or an important family name from a previous generation (Robert Treat Paine, John Quincy Adams). They seem to have been more common for men. I don't have data on this, but my sense is that middle names were more common among the planter class in the South than among other English-speaking colonists — the Lee family all have middle names (men and women).

Miss Fanny A. Forward is certainly unusual — her middle name is Alumina, which is a name I can't find elsewhere in her family. Her father, Abel, was a Yale-educated minister, so he may have been playing with turning "light" into a feminine name. According to the OED, "alumina" is an early name for aluminum, but it was not named until 1790. As a minister, Abel Forward also may have been more attuned to modern naming trends than his rural neighbors.

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